Game Description:The goal of Bastion is to construct a safe haven in the wake of the Calamity, a cataclysmic event that shattered the world into a series of floating islands. As players journey into the wild unknown in search of survivors and supplies, they will confront strange beasts, forge an array of customizable weapons, and gain new powers from specially-brewed spirits. The entire play experience of Bastion is dynamically narrated, gradually revealing a rich backstory as the narrator reacts to the player's actions in real time.

Bastion Review

Bastion is the beautiful action role playing game from SuperGiant Games. Equipped with an assortment of weapon choices, a variety of upgrades, and difficult challenges, this indie game is sure to become a cult classic.

The Pros

Absolutely beautiful

Tons of customization

Can be as easy or difficult as you like

The Cons

Story is lacking

Constant narrator is distracting

Linear levels don't offer as much exploration

Bastion Review:

Bastion opens with your nameless character waking up after the Calamity, a devastating event that has fractured the world into pieces. From the moment your character wakes up, the elderly Rucks narrate your every move. Rucks is so talkative that whether you go left or right, pick one weapon over another, or fall off the world, he'll have something clever to say about it. It's an interesting way to tell the story, but I found the constant narrative distracting and it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying while I was navigating through the gorgeous levels.

It's A Piece Of Cake To Build A Pretty Bastion

The goal of the game is to traverse different areas of the world in order to find “cores” that will give power back to the Bastion. Each core you find allows you to build a structure that adds new layers to the game. It's up to the player to decide which order they want to build and upgrade their structures in, but by the end they all become available. The first set of buildings deal with combat, weapons, and upgrades, while the second set deals with perks and achievements. As you go through the levels in the game you are constantly finding new weapons and ways in which to upgrade them. You return to the Bastion after each level and there you can use these structures to spend your money and materials to make them -- and you -- stronger.

For example, the Arsenal allows you to change your weapon and equip a Secret Skill that causes a lot of damage. My favorite skill was Final Warning, a Scrap Musket skill. With one shot, Final Warning would rain down a massive amount of bullets on my enemies doing insane damage. Some skills were only available when certain weapons were equipped, like Final Warning, while others were available all the time. Skills like Trapper Snare -- a skill that immobilizes foes if they go near it -- are available regardless of weapon as long as you've unlocked it.

The levels in Bastion vary from whimsical springtime levels to dark, depressing areas with quite a variety of enemies in between. What's so neat about Bastion is that as you walk through areas, the floor and your surroundings materialize under your feet as you go. It's a very cool effect and I would have loved to been able to explore the areas even more, but as it turned out all of the levels were unfortunately very linear. As you complete one area more open up, and you can't go back to the ones you've completed.

There are 12 different weapons in Bastion and you get to choose two at a time for each level. More weapons are found as you progress through the game. To test your prowess with each one, there is a Proving Ground. I found the Proving Grounds to be one of the best parts of the game, and definitely some of the most challenging. Each Proving Ground is different as they're all catered to each weapon. Ones like shoot all of the targets in under a few shots were simple, while navigating through a deadly maze to hit enough switches in under 60 seconds proved much more difficult. Proving Grounds offer a first, second, and third place prize that are all generally weapon upgrades, with the first place prize being a Secret Skill. I found the difficulty of the Proving Grounds to be that kind of frustrating fun that Perfectionists like myself have to finish before I can move on in the story.

The weapons can be upgraded up to five times at the Forge, another building you create on the Bastion. Every time you upgrade a weapon it unlocks two different upgrades per level. For example, the first level upgrade for the Machete offers the blade to either cripple foes, or have a 20% critical hit chance. You can only choose one upgrade per level, which again adds more customization to the game. Weapon upgrades are found throughout the levels, at the Lost and Found building, and via Proving Grounds.

Let's Kick It Up A Notch

Luckily, there's a building in the Bastion called the Shrine that enables you to kick the difficulty up a notch (up to ten notches) if you actually want a challenge. At the Shrine you can invoke the Gods of the world and each God you activate will make the foes in the game stronger in different ways. One God, Hense, makes foes hit a lot harder. Another God, Olak, allows foes to sometimes turn to air, making them unable to be hit. The more Gods you invoke the higher the bonus experience and number of Fragments, Bastion's currency, you'll get when you defeat enemies. Frankly speaking, the game becomes tremendously difficult with all ten Gods invoked, and even with only a few activated you really notice how much harder it becomes. Without invoking the gods, the predictability of the enemies gets boring after a while, so the Gods help to spice things up a bit.

Another interesting building in the Bastion is the Distillery. As you kill enemies and gain experience points you level up. With each level you get a little more health and gain access to equip one more Spirit (up to ten). Spirits are special drinks that give your character passive bonuses. There are Spirits like Dreadrum which give you +10% critical hit chance when you're at full health, while other, stronger ones like Bastion Bourbon make health tonics restore you to full health every time and give you more health tonic capacity. You can buy Spirits at another store on the Bastion, called the Lost-and-Found. The Lost-and-Found sells special skills, Gods, and Spirits. In order to buy these items you find Fragments, Bastion's form of currency. Fragments fall from enemies and are randomly placed all over the levels for your collecting enjoyment. It's not clear who you're purchasing these items from in the stores though, which leads me to the most disappointing aspect of Bastion, which is the story.

I Couldn't Hear You Over The Sound Of My Hammer

While there are so many different ways to customize your character's weapons, skills, and the difficulty of the game overall, the story just leaves so much to be desired. You're trying to rebuild the Bastion after the Calamity occurred; meanwhile, there's some sort of war going on between two opposing factions called the Ura and the Caeldonians. Rucks tries to explain what's happening in the story while you're running around in the levels so the message was often lost upon me as I was hacking through enemies.

Also, even though there was a very large variety of weapons to choose from, I found that I only really liked a few of them due to the somewhat clunky controls. The game is played top down, so the angles in which a lot of the weapons fired made them hard to hit the enemies. A target locking system worked well in most situations, but for many I found it very hard to hit the enemies with weapons like the Breaker's Bow or the Galleon Mortar where you had to aim in order to hit a target. My weapons of choice were the Scrap Musket for easy area of attack fire and heavy damage, and the War Machete for quick melee strikes. You can change your preferred weapons before you travel to each level, and there are no restrictions as to which two weapons you can equip. Meaning, if you love ranged combat then you can have two ranged weapons equipped. I liked this, as it allowed for a lot of customization and lets people play how they like to.

The Pieces Almost Fell Together

The only time that I actually enjoyed the storytelling of Bastion was during the Who Knows Where parts. Here, you fight through twenty ranks of foes, trying out different weapons and earning fragments. While in Who Knows Where, Rucks, as always, narrates the story of the main character and other characters in the game. It's here where you can get a leaderboard score based on how far you get in Who Knows Where with as many Shrine Gods invoked as you can handle. For each pack of foes you defeat, Rucks goes deeper in to the backstory of your character, weaving an interesting story while you recuperate from the previous pack. It's a nice change of pace from the standard storytelling in the game where you can't exactly concentrate on what Rucks is saying or enemies will pelt you to death.

Once you complete the game, you can continue trying your luck with Who Knows Where and getting first place Proving Grounds, or you can restart the game in the classic RPG New Game Plus mode with all of your weapons and items. For a small indie game I walked away from Bastion quite impressed. Even though the story lacked depth, the amount of customization and the quality of the art in the game almost made up for it. At the end I wanted to know more about the world of Bastion and its characters. The game is long enough for the type of gameplay it has, I clocked in around ten hours, but I would have loved to explore the full world and learned even more about what was going on while playing.

I just now played the demo, but now I'm seriously torn. I want this game, but I also want SF3 3rd Strike Online Edition, but I don't have enough points for both and don't plan to buy more just yet. HALP!

I now understand why I don't go to g4 anymore for reviews. The major selling point in this game is the narration and the soundtrack. The sound in this game is what gives life to the beautiful scenery. And if you find Rucks annoying then you just have a biased against the game already since he narrates the entire thing. The soundtrack along with the gorgeous level design in Bastion is what makes this game truly great.

I dont find the narrator distracting at all... and if people have a problem with him you can just trun his volume all the way down in the settings, but i dont know why you would want to, because he is cool and really pushes the narration foward, the story was actually alot better than i though it was going to be, and the choices at the end make you want to play it a second time, i have problems with this review because they make there narrator seem as if he repeats himself which he harldy ever does, and he doesnt talk as constantly as they make him seem to be, there is more to the game then just smashing stuff, g4 is really losing what they had, its sad almost, what used to be a great channel just plays cops and hardly plays anything related to games, xplay is almost never on anymore, and they ruined aots, im sorry g4, but i used to love you, but now i hardly watch you anymore, get your act back together and i will come back

Awful review. The game is so much better then you make it out to be. The story is amazing. Apparently you didn't pay attention very well because it all ties together. New game plus shows that even more since you know the references. P.S. The war happened a long time ago.... like 2 generations. The war doesn't take place when you are playing.

The Who Knows Where parts were almost identical to the story telling in the regular levels. I don't know if you just run into crap constantly or cannot hear and see at the same time. There are cues in the levels that advance the narration at certain points when crazy stuff isn't happening.

The worlds are a lot more intriguing if you actually take time to look around. There are a lot of secret items and stuff hanging around that you could just run past. The levels are linear but why is that a con? It's a different game then GTA. Does Castle Crashers get a con for being linear? Does Super Mario Bros? Not all games have to have the same aspects. You can't say a game is too linear if you don't compare it to anything else that is on par with it.

I did and still have problem with the "Slinger Proving Grounds" it's just about impossible. All the other proving grounds can be beaten by good strategy and/or upgrading your weapons.

The loading times were pretty bad until some crazy XBL update late yesterday afternoon.

The only thing I agree with you on is the targeting being sketchy.

The customization is great leaving you to choose what you prefer best (Breaker's Bow and Busher's Pike). Not to mention being able to choose between two upgrades for every upgrade tier making for a very unique weapon choice tailored to your environmental needs or just plain preferences.

The music in the game is very well done as well as the narrators voice being perfect for it. Sound quality is excellent. They even have proximity when it comes to sounds. The closer your character is the louder it gets and vise versa.

Overall I'd give it a 9.9/10 (scale of 0-5 is just dumb not enough variation good job on starting that stupid rating for G4 X Play). Not 10/10 because there are some minor issues but overall amazing game. I was very skeptical about it. I looked at a preview and didn't think it was a game for me. Then I tried the demo and had to get it. Great way to start out the Summer of Arcade Xbox. I can't wait for From Dust.

On a side note. What the hell is wrong with G4's reviews, they suck. You're like the Fox News of gaming. It's like you're trying to make controversy or have people disagree with you just to get attention. Try being more blank slate minded when reviewing a game unless it is in a series. You can't compare one game to another at will. No two games are exactly alike. You especially cannot compare one game to another if you don't freaking say what you're comparing it to. You could be comparing Bastion to Halo: Reach. Which would be dumb as hell.

I purchased this game the first minute it was put on the marketplace and played a few levels and loved them but couldn't play anymore cause I needed sleep. Leah, I don't see how you had trouble hitting enemies with ranged weapons; in my short time with it the ranged weapons seemed to very balanced and I hit every enemy I was aiming for without trouble. What I'm loving though is the special abilities, I only have a couple but they are great, can't wait to play it some more.

Great review, but you should change "is distracting" to "can be distracting" for I, like some, see the narrator as an engaging and a key defining factor of Bastion. Also, maybe they are looking to flesh out characters in later titles. One thing you should put into notion is that this is a 10-15usd indie title, not retail, so ten hours and a good battle system is great.

Please do not take this as complaining or attacking, just my opinion on an otherwise excellent review ^_^